Mentor

I worked at a college designed to teach students one at a time, meeting individual needs (Empire State College, SUNY). There were earlier models of this kind of thing, but we put together a different package--we invented something new. It worked.

I retired 20 years ago.

A year back I volunteered at my library to help a Latina prepare for her citizenship test. The problem was that the student did not speak much English and guessed that Great Britain was a city. She'd grown up in Mexico, where she had dropped out of junior high. Now she was married,  lived in California, had children and worked as a cleaner. All she had going for her was intelligence, natural charm and gumption. Against her she had Trump, his millions of bigots and a test in foreign language. For her the stakes were huge. 

The student memorized the 100 test questions in English on the citizenship test and the answers. If you asked her how many original colonies there had been, she would say, "Thirteen." If you asked her what a colony was, she'd smile. No idea. She knew that the Constitution was the law of the land, but she did not know what a Constitution looked like. To her it was a word.

I did not know how to teach her English, and we didn't have time. I decided to talk with her about colonies and such--using a Spanish-English dictionary provided by Sally, my sister-in-law, who helped us. I thought it would help memory if the student understood some of the basic vocabulary of American history. And I could encourage her to try to speak English, to just plunge ahead and get used to it. She'd have to talk to the citizenship person who examined her. She would be asked questions, maybe asked to take some dictation, etc. (This all seemed almost impossible.)

Friday morning her husband drove her into the city to take the test.

Later she sent me an email. "Hi Goss, I'm approval, my test the citizenship, thank you for your help every friday 😋"